The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3461]
References in his letters to poems and plays.
Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton’s career is traced are enlivened by references to his literary interests. Especially refreshing are the active signs vouchsafed there of his sympathy with the great birth of English drama. It was with plays that he joined other noblemen in 1598 in entertaining his chief, Sir Robert Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that embassy in which Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris ‘certain songs’ which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of literary tastes, should share his delight in reading. Twelve months later, while Southampton was in Ireland, a letter to him from the Countess attested that current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk. ‘All the news I can send you,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘that I think will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly miller’s thumb—a boy that’s all head and very little body; but this is a secret.’ This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl and countess familiarity with Falstaff’s adventures in Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV,’ where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as ‘good pint pot’ (Pt. I. II. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the countess jested thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the father of ‘the boy that was all head and very little body,’ was a playful allusion to Sir John’s creator is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. In the letters of Sir Toby Matthew, many of which were written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been bestowed on Shakespeare: ‘As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, “what for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt better since I was a man.”’
His love of the theatre.
When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland ‘come not to Court’ but ‘pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.’ It seems that the fascination that the drama had for Southampton and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and Essex in February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for their insurrection, in the hope that the play-scene of the deposition of a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their rebellious design. Imprisonment sharpened Southampton’s zest for the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage and his fellow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden to present the ‘old’ play of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ whose ‘wit and mirth’ were calculated ‘to please her Majesty exceedingly.’
Poetic adulation. Barnabe Barnes’s sonnet, 1593.
But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton’s literary predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of his political or domestic life, that the amplest proofs survive of his devotion to letters. From